Why the #NeverTrump movement is a failure

The inmate has taken over the asylum


At a campaign rally in February, former Republican presidential candidate and Adult Student Council Treasurer Marco Rubio tore into Donald Trump. Rubio called Trump something particularly damning: a con artist “who has made a career out of telling people lies.” This insult, paired with the infamous “small hands” remark, gave Rubio brief life in the Republican race.

Jump ahead three months, and Marco Rubio has reversed course. He has offered to help Trump’s campaign in order to prevent a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Rubio has joined Bobby Jindal, Lindsay Graham, Christ Christie and Ben Carson–fellow recipients of Trump insults–in capitulating to the presumptive GOP nominee. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan met and spoke with The Donald but has yet to make an endorsement.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has yet to endorse Donald Trump

This situation is unique compared to past party divisions, even ones as ugly as Hillary v. Obama in 2008. A New York Times/CBS poll showed that “eight in 10 Republican voters” want their leaders to “support Mr. Trump even if they disagree with him on important issues.” Trump’s unfavorable ratings among Republicans went down to 21 percent from 36 percent in an April poll. The bad news, though, is that in the same poll, more than eight in 10 Republican voters “call the party divided, and 43 percent say they are discouraged about its future.”

One Republican voter I spoke with was Carol Tasker, who has a negative impression of Trump. “He’s ignorant, he’s rude, he has NO morals whatsoever,” says Tasker, adding that “none of his policies even begin to make sense in any sort of real world.” Trump’s biggest appeal, according to Tasker, is his demagoguery. “It feels like he’s going after the downtrodden, the disenchanted, and the angry,” she says. “He’s feeding on the fears [that voters have], while still feeding [voters] even more.”

Tasker’s sentiments are similar to that of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, who gave a speech lambasting Trump on March 3rd. According to the Wall Street Journal, Romney was triggered by, among other things, Trump’s mocking of John McCain’s military service and his refusal to distance himself from former KKK grand wizard David Duke. Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and an influential neoconservative voice, reportedly met with Romney about a third-party presidential bid; however, Romney has since ended any talks about running.

Former GOP nominee Mitt Romney will not pursue a third-party candidacy, despite previous rumors.

Although Kristol insists that there’ll be a conservative third-party candidate (both Trump and liberals think otherwise), he and conservatives such as Tasker and Romney are in a rapidly shrinking minority within the conservative movement. Since the Obama presidency, the political media has focused on the two sides of the Republican Party: the classic conservatives (architects of the party’s nearly 30-year reign over American politics, subscribers to “trickle-down” economics, foreign policy hawks) and the insurgent conservatives (focused on govt. spending, along with thorny social issues). The insurgency has been gaining momentum since the congressional elections in 2010 and reached its zenith with Trump’s nomination. In a recent Rolling Stone piece, Matt Taibbi argues that Trump’s success shouldn’t have been a surprise to classic conservatives:

On the one hand, they’d been blindsided by Trump, a foulmouthed free-coverage magnet who impulsively decided to make mocking the Republican Party mullahs his pet project for the years 2015-2016.

But they were also undone by a surge of voter anger that was in significant part their own fault. In recent years, the Koch brothers/Tea Party wing of the GOP had purged all moderates from the party, to the point where anyone who was on record supporting the continued existence of any federal agency, said Mexicans were people, or spoke even theoretically about the utility of taxes was drummed from the candidate rolls.

Taibbi notes how predictable it was for politicians like Christie or Rubio to bend over to Trump. (He likens them to crackheads.) The holdouts–the Romneys, the Kristols–have suffered a worse fate: exile to a deserted location, with little chance of returning.